Off-limits

Sometimes I find blogging to be a little... tricky. This might come as a surprise, considering the things I've shared here over the past few years, but I'm actually a very private person in real life. (It helps that maybe only about five people I know in real life read this... as far as I know...) However, I do try to keep some topics off-limits. One of them was the trouble I was having in my marriage. I guess I posted the occasional vent when I was feeling particularly abandoned, but in general I tried to keep that between the two of us. And even so, there have been many things about our marriage and divorce that I have kept private, because discussing them here just isn't... appropriate, or fair.

I guess it's a fine line between sharing too much and just sharing my story. I try to walk it as best I can. I don't want to stop telling it, because I find it therapeutic and lord knows I need all the therapy I can get, and also because I know there are a lot of you out there who follow along with all my trainwrecks of various kinds, and hey, who wants to disappoint the internet?

So, I'm about to break one of my rules and talk about one of my off-limits topics. Because I need to. Because it's important to my story.

Men. Dating. Life after marriage. Let me preface all of this by saying that I do not involve Caroline in any of it. I don't want her to get attached to anyone who is likely to walk away. She doesn't need to feel any more abandoned than she will when her father moves 2000 miles away and stays there for the rest of her life.

I haven't been seriously involved with anyone since Tyler, although, as I type that, I wonder if it is exactly true. No one I've called a boyfriend, anyway. Mostly it's been a distraction. Recently, though, it was somewhat... more.

Letting people in right after a divorce is dangerous. Also stupid. Stupid is a key word here. Almost having a doctorate doesn't necessarily exclude me from being a total idiot, if I haven't already proved that point over and over again.

Needless to say, whatever it was (and really, it wasn't supposed to be anything at all) is over. It happened a little while ago and to be honest, I'm fine, but it's really made me slam on the brakes and take a good look at myself. Since I was 16 or 17, I've been in a relationship of one kind or another. When one would end, I'd leap headfirst into something else to distract myself. This is an awful pattern to get into. You end up with distraction upon distraction, and, if you're like me and you suffer from a depressing and somewhat pathetic inability to keep any kind of walls up, you get more involved than you should, every time. Eventually, you end up buried under all these distractions-turned-relationships and you have no idea who you are anymore.

I might be being a little harsh with myself. Or maybe I'm finally getting it. Maybe a little of both.

Regardless, I'm taking a break. Enough is enough. I need time to deal with myself, and focus on my daughter, and graduate, and get started with my career. I need to stop relying on other people to make me feel like I am worth something. I need to be happy with myself before I can ever be happy with anyone else. I feel like if I don't break this cycle, everything will be doomed to failure from the start. And I have to believe that I deserve more than that.

So no more. I'm calling it quits until I feel that I'm ready to stand on my own two feet in a relationship. No more distractions. I didn't end my disaster of a marriage and take control of my life just to throw it all away again.